A blog about developments in the nongovernmental, nonprofit, charitable sector in China.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

A New Dawn For Civil Society After the 18th Party Congress?

I'm reposting a Policy Brief I posted on China Development Brief more than a month ago. In two more weeks, the National People's Congress will be held here in Beijing and Xi Jinping, the new General Secretary of the Communist Party will be anointed as the next President of the People's Republic of China.

POLICY
BRIEF NO. 12 (December 2012): A New Dawn After the 18th Party
Congress?

After the 18th Party
Congress, Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, who have been anointed to become the new
president and premier respectively (they will assume these positions after the
next National People’s Congress in March of 2013) made a number of public
appearances that gave observers some optimism that the new leadership will be
supportive of reforms strengthening China’s civil society, but we will have to
wait and see if they follow up with actions, and not just words.

Xi made a trip to the more
freewheeling southern province of Guangdong to promote the reforms being
carried out there. He also spoke on the 30th
anniversary of the 1982 revision to the Constitution, calling for officials to do more
to protect citizen rights, including human rights, and promote public
confidence in the law. "We must firmly establish, throughout society, the
authority of the Constitution and the law and allow the overwhelming masses to
fully believe in the law," he said. In a separate meeting with HIV/AIDS
activists, Li Keqiang
called for the government to provide more support, specifically in terms of registration
and funding, to grassroots NGOs engaged in combating HIV/AIDS.

Two other developments caught the
media’s eye this month that deserve our attention. One is the government’s
effort to build a foundation for government contracting to NGOs, and the other
is an effort at the local level to create a “hub” system to better support and
manage NGOs. The first effort is important because it heralds a new era of
state-NGO collaboration, albeit on the state’s terms, and offers cash-strapped
NGOs a new source of funding. The second is significant because it represents
an effort by the local party-state to bring NGOs under their big tent.

Government contracting to NGOs will
receive a big boost with the historic decision by the central government to set
up a RMB 200 million (USD 32 million) fund in 2013 to purchase social services
from social organizations. In line with this announcement, the Ministry of
Civil Affairs has issued a “2013 Project Implementation Plan for the Government
Financial Support of Social Organizations' Participation in Social Services”,
and the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the
Ministry of Finance have jointly issued a set of guidelines about how this fund will be used.

In the other development, the
Guangdong provincial government, following in the footsteps of an earlier
experiment in Beijing, is putting in place a “hub” system that will use “people’s
organizations” such as the Communist Youth League and Women’s Federation, which
enjoy close ties to the party-state, as a vehicle for supporting and managing
NGOs.